I cringe every time I hear someone mention ShareThis. When optimizing a site, it becomes a nightmare to speed up; a paranoids worst fear with all the third-party calls it makes — and a blackhole for sercuity experts tracking down the seemingly ever-changing external scripts it loads.
ShareThis Third-Party Resources
In the process of implementing a CSP, I was shocked to find the total number of resources ShareThis calls. At the time of writing this, I counted a total of 39 domains and subdomains it the ShareThis plugin was calling:
- http://w.sharethis.com (JavaScript, Image)
- http://wd-edge.sharethis.com (JavaScript)
- http://wd.sharethis.com (JavaScript)
- http://w.sharethis.com (CSS)
- http://l.sharethis.com (Image)
- http://adadvisor.net (Image)
- http://bcp.crwdcntrl.net (Image)
- http://rc.rlcdn.com (JavaScript)
- http://d.agkn.com (JavaScript)
- http://secure-us.imrworldwide.com (JavaScript)
- http://log.dmtry.com (JavaScript)
- http://match.adsrvr.org (JavaScript)
- http://www.wtp101.com (JavaScript)
- http://www.adadvisor.net (Image)
- http://p.brilig.com (Image)
- http://e.nexac.com (Image)
- http://su.addthis.com (Image)
- http://rtd.tubemogul.com (Image)
- http://d.p-td.com (Image)
- http://ds.reson8.com (Image)
- http://loadus.exelator.com (Image)
- http://dp2.33across.com (Image)
- http://p.nexac.com (Image)
- http://p.raasnet.com (Image)
- http://p.rfihub.com (Image)
- http://i.w55c.net (Image)
- http://loadm.exelator.com (Image)
- http://a.triggit.com (Image)
- http://sync.mathtag.com (Image)
- http://r.casalemedia.com (Image)
- http://dpm.demdex.net (Image)
- http://idsync.rlcdn.com (Image)
- http://load.s3.amazonaws.com (Image)
- http://d.xp1.ru4.com (Image)
- http://segments.adap.tv (Image)
- http://dm.de.mookie1.com (Image)
- http://ib.adnxs.com (Image)
- http://tags.bluekai.com (Image)
- http://sync.tidaltv.com (Image)
Nuts, huh?! Not a big surprise anymore why ShareThis was causing my slow page load times. From what I found, the majority of the calls are for ad and user habit tracking pixels. No wonder their a free service, their probably getting paid big bucks from companies to track what you’re doing. Though, I understand they need to connect to the various social network APIs to grab numbers, I don’t think they need to add tracking pixels for advertisements and user habits.
An example is adadvisor.net and crwdcntrl.net. Their domains used by Targus Info and Lotame which is an advertising company that is part of a network of sites, cookies, and other technologies used to track you, what you do and what you click on, as you go from site to site, surfing the Web. Over time, sites like adadvisor.net and crwdcntrl.net can help make an online profile of you usually including the sites you visit, your searches, purchases, and other behavior. Your profile can then be exchanged and sold between various companies as well as being sold to other advertisers and marketers.
Alternatives to ShareThis
After finding out everything ShareThis is doing, it was time to find some alternatives. Here’s some I’ve found that seem to be less resource intensive—though may still load ad and user habit tracking pixels, not nearly as many as ShareThis:
- AddThis.com
- AddToAny.com
- Shareaholic.com
- Share42.xom (very basic, no third-party scripts)
WordPress Plugins
If you prefer a more plug-and-play options, here’s some pretty good WordPress plugins and Drupal modules for social sharing.
1. Flare
Flare is a simple yet eye-catching social sharing bar that gets you followed and lets your content get shared via posts, pages, and media types.
2. Social Count Plus
Display the counting data of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Steam Community, SoundCloud posts and comments.
3. Dig Dig
Your all in one share buttons plugin. Add a floating bar with share buttons to your blog. Just like Mashable!
4. AddThis
AddThis Share Buttons help drive traffic to your site by helping visitors share, bookmark and email your content to over 330 services.
5. Shareaholic
Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu and related content widget to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three.
Drupal Modules
1. Social media
The social media module helps integrate your website with social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+. It provides an centralized way of managing social media profile information and plug-in widgets such as follow and share buttons.
2. Easy Social
Centered in a single place, you don’t need to worry in including external javascript libraries, and enabling several social modules.
3. AddToAny
This module helpers your readers and subscribers share, email and bookmark your articles and pages using the popular services such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and over 100 more.
4. AddThis
This is the #1 bookmarking and sharing button on the net. Simple and easy to use button that’s used by 14 million websites worldwide and reaching 1.3 billion people worldwide per month.
5. Service links
Service Links facilitates the adding of social networks links or javascript buttons within the content with a special focus on developers and themers interested to extend their number or customize their displaying. Built on Drupal for Drupal doesn’t include commercial advertising or spying hidden code and doesn’t require third part libraries.
10 comments on “ShareThis Slowing Down Your Site? Here’s Why.”.
# Feb 19, 2018
Very very interesting. Out of further interest, what system do you use for your shares? They are slick.
# Mar 8, 2018
I use Jetpack’s sharing system, share daddy.
# Jan 15, 2018
Hi Ben and all the people who responded to your good article!
Yep, that is a hell of a shitty plugin Share this. I also installed it 6 month’s ago and deleted it right away. Last week busy with optimizing my homepage (https://www.tvworkshop.com/) with help of GTmetrix and my web developer also found out that this stupid ShareThis company is slowing a lot of websites. We improved our loading speed on my website with almost 70% and see here the end result:
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.tvworkshop.com/hhluU3w7
The last catch is to get rid of this cray ShareThis:). Had contact with GTmetrix in Canada and it is for numerous people a big problem and they do not how to solve it. I’m not a technical expert so i also do not know how to solve this.
Maybe you can write an article about it Ben?
Greetings from Singapore,
Emile Leus
# Jun 20, 2017
Thank you for this case study and review has helped make my decision a lot more effortless now!
Off my social share list is number one ShareThis removing from my WordPress sites today thank you again.
# Mar 4, 2017
I found this on my site from GTmetrix, l.sharethis.com. I have no idea where it came from or how to get rid of it. Any help would be greatly appreciated , thank you.
# Feb 23, 2017
I’ve been struggling with this fking thing for months now – for some reason its added 3 lines in my site to call back to to sharethis.com base, despite me never using sharethis or anything resembling anything like social media on my page.
I have gone through every piece of code in the file editor and cant find a single thing relating to it…. then when i test my site, all I see is this god damn call backs to this piece of sht companies website….. and I cant remove them, im going to have to scrap my entire site and start again it seems its the only way to rid myself of this garbage once and for all
# Dec 3, 2016
Thank you for this great article and the end of an tedious 2+ years of on / off trying to get to the bottom of slow page load times on my WordPress site. With the unsuccessful help of my web host (150 emails back and forth) and web developer this article nails the problem.
As soon as I turned this POS ShareThis software off my sales TRIPLED OVERNIGHT. I’m in the UK and most of my customers are in Australia and the US which means the site took a long time to load there despite using cache plugins. For the record au also turn my Cloudflare plugin off at the same time but I figure when I turn it back on the site should theoretically be even faster.
Despite having 37,000 shares of my site which is supposed to install confidence and increase sales the exact opposite was true.
Get rid of it.
Thanks once again,
# Jun 18, 2015
Really appreciated this post! We were getting delayed load times as our site was trying to load the http://ds.reson8.com resource you mentioned. Removed ShareThis, and the site is loading remarkably faster. Thanks again.
# Apr 28, 2015
Awesome article. I used pingdom to analyze my results with and without ShareThis. Turns out ShareThis was making an extra 28 requests (on average) per page, and adding an extra 149kb of data to my page size.
After removing Sharethis and adding Share42, it added only 3 requests and an extra 32kb to my page size. Huge improvement in performance vs. ShareThis.
Thanks again.
# Jul 12, 2020
Thank you for the review. It’s quite eye opening as I loved the plugin based on the monstrous way it shows its sharing gadgets.
Will uninstall it today and see how the growth goes.
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